Developing the next generation of African leaders (with Fred Swaniker)

Fred Swaniker believes Africa will struggle to move forward without more positive leaders working for the greater good.

That's why he's committed to developing the next generation of trailblazing African leaders. Through the African Leadership Group and Sand Technologies, Fred hopes to train 3 million leaders by 2035 who can help tackle the root causes of some of the continent's most enduring problems.

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Transcript

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Hello and welcome to another episode of Positive Leadership, the podcast that helps you grow as an individual, a leader, and ultimately as a global citizen. Before he reached adulthood, my guest today, Fred Swaniker, had already lived in Ghana, Gambia, Botswana and Zimbabwe. What he learned was that in countries with strong institutions, one good leader might not make an enormous difference, but in countries with weak structures, leaders could make or break a country.

FRED SWANIKER: We're spending all this time and effort trying to address the symptoms of leadership, trying to give blankets to refugees because there's a war or you're giving food aid because there's a famine, how do we make sure that these problems don't happen in the first place? If we didn't get better leaders, we wouldn't move forward.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: And armed with that knowledge, Fred's been busy nurturing the next generation of trailblazing African leaders. 3 million of them, he hopes, by 2035 will be best placed to tackle the root causes of some of the continent's most deep-seated problems. In pursuit of that goal, Fred has set up the African Leadership Academy and the African Leadership University, which some have called the Harvard of Africa. Most recently, he set up Sand Technologies, which employs those coming up through the pipeline to deliver innovative, impactful projects, which we will be talking about later on this episode. It was such a pleasure to talk to Fred, who has some great stories about the ups and downs of his early career, and we discuss how good leadership skills can help drive positive change and the importance of risk taking. And he also has some wise words on how you can make a difference, whether that's as an entrepreneur or as a philanthropist. As a Frenchman, as my accent tells you, probably, it's fairly straightforward for me to understand the idea of what it means to be a European. It’s always hard to be a French citizen and European citizen at the same time. But can you tell us how would you define the African identity, given that there are so many countries with many different cultures, political backgrounds, social norms, language dialects and more, and you've been living in many of them, by the way. So can you help us understand the African identity?

FRED SWANIKER: Well, saying there's an African identity would be very similar to saying that there's a European identity or there's a Latin American identity, right? In all these countries, each country has its own distinctive identity. The French are known for their food and their wine. The Italians are known for their passion and their fashion. Every country has its own flavour, but there's something that binds you as Europeans. So the same thing exists in Africa. The West Africans maybe were less colonized by the rest of the world, s therefore a lot of their culture is still very strong. Their fashion music and everything comes from there. Southern Africa was much more influenced by the Europeans. So what you find is that Africa is not one country. It’s very important to understand that. It's made up of 54 different countries. You might have in one country, like Tanzania, 32 different ethnic groups, different languages and everything. So a very diverse continent. But what I find unites all of us is, we were all either colonized by France or Britain and in some cases Portugal, so that colonial experience and the fight to gain independence was a shared experience across the whole continent. Almost every country in Africa is struggling with issues of development, of poverty. But at the same time, we have this incredible clean slate and the chance to innovate and leapfrog and build new systems of the future. We all have to deal with major challenges in healthcare, in infrastructure and political stability and all these things. Io the extent that we have a common identity, it's around the problems that we have to solve and the opportunities that we have as a continent. You will find that in most countries in Africa, we're very welcoming people. We are joyous people. We believe in community and maybe less individualistic than other cultures. And these are some of the things that I've found as I've lived and worked all across Africa. I feel at home in almost any country in Africa that I go to, and that's kind of the situation.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: That sounds like a great start to talk about the leadership platform you have built over the years. And we'll come back to that, having some at least commonalities in terms of core values, some history as well, and aspirations for the future. I'd like to go back to young Fred. Okay. A few years back in your life. As I said, you were born in 1976, in Ghana. What kind of values, what kind of beliefs did you inherit from your parents, family, or extended community around yourself?

FRED SWANIKER: That’s a great question. My parents, from a very early age, instilled in me a deep, passion for education and deep care for education. It was the most important thing in our family. There was no TV growing up until I was 12. We were just given books, and that's how we entertained ourselves. By the time I went to school, I was far ahead of most of my peers in terms of reading skills. We had rigorous debate and discussion about world topics around the table. My father used to listen to the BBC World Service and there would be news on. So I was always very good in general knowledge when I went to school. And I knew everything that was going on because we would talk a lot about it. There was debate that was encouraged… My parents also instilled in us a very high bar of excellence. We always knew that we had to achieve something, that we were privileged to have education, to have a roof over our heads, to have three meals a day. And they made it very clear to us that we were not to take that privilege for granted, that we had to work hard and we had to use it to do something positive for the world. There was also a very strong sense of pride that they instilled in us and the need to not wait for others to do things for us, but to do things for ourselves.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Be in control of your destiny. Be the masters of your destiny. 

FRED SWANIKER:  And I would also say integrity. Doing the right thing. Making sure that we delivered on what we said we were going to do. That was a very, very important thing from my parents.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: A very important value indeed to create something valuable and creating trust with others, actually, all the time, I think. So I think you come from a long line of educators. Your great uncle founded a prominent school in Ghana, and your grandmother and grandfather were both teachers. Your mother also set up a school, which you became the headmaster of when you were just 18 years old. So I'd like you to go back a few years. Do you recall your first day as a very young teacher, fresh teacher? What did it feel like being so young in a classroom, standing up in front of all those kids, Fred? Tell us the atmosphere, the feelings in yourself if you can remember, maybe the picture of the kids, you. What happened that day?

FRED SWANIKER:  The way I ended up as the headmaster of the school was really because my mother had had a good track record as a teacher in the town that we lived in Botswana. The parents came to her and they said, we want you to set up a school because you really know how to do education. Unfortunately, my dad had just passed away, and so she had four kids to look after and to send to college. And she said, I can't quit my job as a teacher to start the school. But they kept putting pressure on her. So she said, okay, I'll start it, but I'll have my kids run the school and I'll supervise them. So that's how I ended up as the headmaster of the school. At the time, it was 25 children in a small building and I had three teachers to manage. So it was definitely daunting going into the school and seeing teachers who were much older than me and I had to manage them. All these eager young people who were looking to learn, so I would say it was scary, but it was also very exciting at the same time, because I could see how eager the young people were to get knowledge. And within the first day, I could see that I could make a difference, because I was already teaching people who had come in and by the end of the day, first day, they already had learned some skills. And it gave me deep, deep satisfaction to really make a difference.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: I can imagine what was going on in Fred's mind in that moment. That mixture of fear and anticipation he talks about. It sounds like what Bill George calls a crucible moment, one of those times of adversity where great strength is shown. We all have crucible moments in our life, and it's so important to take time to pause and reflect on them. These are the moments that make us the leader and person we are going to be. It seems to me that passion for making a difference has really guided Fred throughout everything he's done since that day he stood up in front of those 25 children.

FRED SWANIKER:  It definitely was a crucible moment, a defining moment. At the time, I didn't realize it. I didn't realize that it would shape my life forever because I ended up being that headmaster for a year. And through that, I learnt about how you build an education institution from scratch? I saw also the difference that I could make in young people's lives. And it instilled in me that passion for education and transformation of others. Fast forward seven years later, when I was 25, which is when I got inspired to start the African Leadership Academy. 

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Just seven years. That's pretty amazing.

FRED SWANIKER:  I think a lot of what I've learned about leadership is that many of the leaders that we see today changing the world, our leaders or entrepreneurs, you find that there was an experience that they had as a teenager that gave them a small taste of leadership, that gave them the confidence and the courage to do something bigger later on. So in my case, it was running the school at age 18, which then led me to build the academy when I was 25, which led me to launch the university when I was 35. And then when I was 40, I created ALX, and that small school where I was teaching 25 kids went to a 250 students at the academy, 2,000 students at the university, and 250,000 students now at ALX. If I hadn't done that small project, it wouldn't have given me the confidence and the skills to do something bigger. In the same way that Bill Gates, was as an 18 year old, figuring out writing computer code, which then became Microsoft. Or when Steve Jobs was given some parts by Bill Hewlett when he was a teenager and the internship and then that created Apple or that Google founders or Mark Zuckerberg when he was in his dorm room at 18. So that was my experience.  Even as we develop leaders in the African Leadership Group, we always focus on giving them that crucible experience. We manufacture that in our institutions so that they get practice in leadership at an early age, and that gives them the confidence and the passion to do something bigger later on.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: What an amazing foundation it gave you, Fred, early on. And I guess what enormous pride, not just for you, but your family, extended family and community, to see you not just at 18 years old doing that, but seven years later and many years after that. creating that movement that we will discuss in the next few minutes on African leadership. Now, I'd like to move forward before we go back to the African leadership creation as well. After college, you started working in a very different place, McKinsey, which I got to know well as a partner and a customer and vice versa for many years. And they sponsored you, I think, to do an MBA at Stanford. It was whilst you are at Stanford that you devised and wrote up the business plan for the African Leadership University. So tell me about the vision you had at the time as you were working for McKinsey. What came in your mind?

FRED SWANIKER:  Good question. So my work with McKinsey took me across Africa. It took me to Ghana, to Nigeria, to South Africa, and I worked with many of the biggest companies on the continent and also with some government institutions and what I realized from that experience, and also my experience of growing up in Africa, leaving Ghana at the age of four because of political instability, going to Gambia, Botswana, Zimbabwe… I had come to see by the time I went to Stanford that the number one problem that Africa faced was leadership. And many of the challenges that we had, whether it was in the public sector and the private sector, when you really analyse the root cause, it was leadership. And I think it was this awareness of leadership is the big issue that we need to address. And I thought, okay, how do you create the kind of talent that you need for society? If you want better doctors, you create a medical school. If you want better engineers, you create an engineering school. If you want better leaders, you’ve got to create a leadership school. 

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Makes a lot of sense.

FRED SWANIKER:  And so that's how I came up with the idea for the African Leadership Academy to more deliberately develop the leaders that we needed versus just hoping that they appeared by accident.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: We'll discuss some of that in a few minutes. I’d love you to go back and reflect a bit more about the McKinsey years. Financially, I know that you had a deal, right. That you needed to work for them for two years after graduating, given the fact that you could do that and be at Stanford with their financial help. But you are so keen to get the Academy off the ground that you just talked about that you quit McKinsey early. And I understand they sent you a pretty big bill to pay back. Beyond how much you had to pay back, I guess it must have been pretty painful at the time for you, as you had this big dream of building this Leadership University Academy?

FRED SWANIKER:  Yes, JP, I mean, that was a very tough time in my life because I came to a crossroads. On the one hand, I go back to McKinsey. I have a cushy job. Within six years, I'm guaranteed of becoming a partner and making $1 million a year. Or on the other path, I go and follow my dream. I create this academy, which was unknown, untested, and I have to pay them $120,000. So I had no idea where I was going to get the money from when I decided not to go back to them. I borrowed some money. I had raised a little bit of money to start the academy, and I used the money that I was going to pay myself to pay McKinsey. So what that meant was that between my borrowings and what was spent with my salary, I had two years when I had no salary. And so I slept on my friend's couches, I house sat for people, and I made sure that I scheduled one meeting for breakfast, one meeting for lunch, one meeting for dinner, and when the bill came out, pretend like I was going to pay for it, and then they'll say, no, no, no. you are starving entrepreneur. Then I'll say, really? Are you sure? Then I'll be like, oh man, I managed to eat today. So that's how I survived for two years. My mother didn't talk to me for two years because she thought I was being reckless. She was very disappointed, because she used to love telling her friends. My son is only 21 and he flies business class McKinsey, and now I was this broke person living like a vagabond and I couldn't even have lunch.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: That shows clearly your resilience early on to take on a big bet without any backup or plan B at the time. I want to continue on this same discussion because I think it connects to another dimension of your life as well, which I kind of relate to on philanthropy. I know you shared that story and I’d love you to share that story again. I understand once you were planning to raise some money for the Academy and the foundation, and so you were basically meeting with an important donor outside of New York, I don't know exactly where it was, and I think the meeting didn't go as well as expected. And I know those meetings to raise money are not easy. We have done that with my foundation as well. And you are so broke. I understand that you literally had to walk back to New York from a very far distance. Can you tell us the story, the context, the characters around the table and what the young Fred did? Another shaping moment for you, Fred.

FRED SWANIKER:  This was about a year after I had graduated from Stanford Business School, and I was in New York, and I went across to New Jersey on the other side of the Hudson River, to go and see a donor. And as you said, the meeting didn't go well. I didn't get any money. But I was so broke that I didn't even have the train fare to take the train back to New York. So I was standing there on the other side of the river, and I'm looking, and I can see Wall Street and on Wall Street all my friends from Stanford Business School are working in those buildings. They're making $200,000 to $300,000 a year. They're driving Porsches. And here I am at the other side of the river, and I don't even have money for a train fare to go back across the river. So to this day, I do not remember how I got home that night. I don't remember. They say that trauma has a way of wiping out your memories. I must have begged someone or I don't know how I got home. I don't remember how I made it back home. It was that traumatic an experience. All I remember is standing there thinking, how does an ex-McKinsey guy with a Stanford MBA be standing here? And I don't even have any money to go back across the river. I don't have enough… $3 or whatever it cost to get the train back.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Building on this philanthropic experience that you had many of in your life, of course, I'd like to share just a couple of extracts from a book I think you enjoyed reading, and I did the same. It's a book authored by Gerald Panas called Mega Gifts: Who gives them? Who gets them? And I've just picked a couple of quotes from the book. He said individuals give emotionally, not cerebrally. Major gifts are made to change or save lives, and securing a mega gift means helping the donor share your dream. So in your own experience, which one of these has been the most important factor, decisive factor for the donors, to make you a big check for the university and building your dream? What worked, between the donors, yourself? The emotions? What was behind that?

FRED SWANIKER:  What I found, JP, is that ultimately, getting that big gift from a donor is about allowing them to achieve their vision and their dream through us. So one thing I've come to realize is that the ultimate aim of everyone, the ultimate level of satisfaction for human beings, is to make a difference. When you think about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the top of that hierarchy is self-actualization. And so once people have secured significant means, they will now want to say, how do I make meaning out of my life? How do I have more impact? And so what I've come to learn is that securing that big gift is not about what matters to you and your program. It's about really enabling philanthropists to live a dream of impact, to be able to, through our institution, see how they can make a difference in the world and to have more meaning in their life. It's about understanding what they are interested in, what their passions are, and then seeing how it intersects with what you're doing. Many times when people are raising money, they think, oh, what I'm doing is good, so everyone should give me money. But if it doesn't align with what the donor wants to do or what they're thinking about, what their dream is, then, you can try and pitch them all you can but they won't give you money. So it's about listening more than speaking. And understanding what they really care about, what drives them, what they're passionate about, and then seeing if there's some intersection with what you do. And if there isn't, it's okay. Don't try and force it, because there are many philanthropists out there and it’s really just about listening and finding out whose passion is intersect with yours. And then that's where there's a magical collaboration.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: Now I can relate to that frame on philanthropic experience over the last almost decade now. Just like you, I found that whenever you are able to truly connect deeply into the inner meaning, into the personal mission of the donors, and the way you can show that it connects with the mission of your NGO or association or foundation. And as you are able to make them part of the journey, particularly in touch with the beneficiaries, the people that you are enabling to transform, that makes always a huge difference. And a big, big, big support happened afterwards, which is more than financial. It's emotional. It becomes personal. And it's lasting.

FRED SWANIKER:  Through the different organizations that we've started in the last 20 years, we've raised about 1.2 billion USD now and about half of that, I've never had to ask for it, because people connect with what we're doing so much on their own. We engage them, they come and they see what we're doing. They meet the beneficiaries, they spend time in our environment, and then they say, I want to do something. 

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: The meaning of being a true philanthropist is not about the money. It's about passion. And as Fred says, telling those stories is so important because it brings data to life and the details resonate with people, with supporters. For example, I've read about one of Fred's young leaders who was forced to drop out of school because her parents could not afford the fees, so she turned instead to rearing rabbits, which are a delicacy in the part of Kenya where she lives. And she's been so successful, employing women and using the money she raised to not only go back to school herself, but pay for other children to get an education. It is stories like that that help people connect and encourage them to give. I’d like to shift gears a bit and talk about the African Leadership Academy, which is an amazing success. Students went on to top universities like Stanford, Harvard, but of course, you don't want to send the brightest minds from Africa overseas. So that's the reason why you set up the African Leadership University. And one thing that's really unique about I think what you do is. Really helping them to learn how to learn. I know you talk and you're passionate about that, and also really focusing on problem solving and critical thinking. And students, in order to achieve that, are choosing missions, not majors. They're actually achieving, doing through projects, and they create their own learning experience around those missions. So can you tell us more about that, the way you shaped that experience, as I call it, as opposed just to curriculum?

FRED SWANIKER:  I'll say two things. Firstly, it comes from a philosophy about what is education in the first place. We believe that the world is changing so fast that the end goal of education is not to memorize facts and figures, but rather to learn how to learn and learn how to solve problems. Therefore when you look at that, you then say, okay, then let's give them problems to solve. The other angle that we looked at was that we said, we are building a leadership university, and we believe that leaders, at the end of the day, are problem solvers for society. Based on those two angles, you say this university will be different in the following way. We're not going to give you a menu of academic disciplines like Bachelor of Science in Chemistry, Bachelor of Arts in History, like most universities. We're going to give you a menu of the biggest challenges facing Africa. We have this list of what we call the seven grand challenges – healthcare, climate change, education, infrastructure, governance, youth unemployment, and so forth. And then we have a list of what we call the seven great opportunities, which is where Africa has been blessed. This is where we have unusual competitive advantages that we haven't captured yet, like agriculture, tourism, the environment, wildlife conservation, the empowerment of women, arts and the creative sector. So we then say to the students, don't choose an academic major, choose a mission, pick one of these problems, and then curate your learning around these problems, so then you are learning for a purpose. You want to solve these problems. It then links all your activities to these problems that you want to solve. And then the end goal is someone who has learned how to learn and who has become a problem solver and then they can then go out into the world with deep passion and conviction and to really make a difference.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: I love that framing. I love that framework, actually, Fred. Talking about real challenges and opportunities both for the continent, but actually for the people themselves, the leaders, as they shape their skills. One thing I’d like to talk about with you is the way you help them setting their goals, which is an important aspect as well of shaping your life in many ways, as you are learning, but then as you're working, as you're contributing to the world. One of my guests and friends know Michael Bungay Stanier, who is a bestselling author on coaching. He wrote another book a few months ago, actually, and it's all about the way we can define worthy goals. And to him, there are three parts to worthy goals. The first part, it has to be thrilling. Meaning, do you care about it really? The second one is, is it important? Does it give to the world more than it takes? And the third one is, does it stretch you and grow you and keep you learning? So how do you help students set worthy goals, Fred, that are appropriate to each one of them given what their lives are or what they what they could actually leave in the future? What does it look like for them to shape and set their own goals?

FRED SWANIKER:  That’s a good question. We have a similar philosophy. I wrote a paper on Medium today about how do you find your calling in life? It’s titled Resist that Calling, It's not your Purpose in Life. I believe that everyone has been put on earth for a purpose. And over every day, every year, you are exposed to different ways in which you can make a difference. I call these the moments of obligation. This is where you see a problem and you are frustrated by it. And you want to solve it, or you see a great opportunity and you're like, wow, maybe I should go into this space. So this probably would have been when Bill Gates saw the advent of the PC. That was a moment of obligation saying, here's a big chance I want to do it. Or when Malala Yousafzai saw the way in which young people in her native country were being deprived of education. She said, I'm going to fight against this injustice. It’s that moment of obligation, I believe that you should ignore most of those moments, because it's not why you were put on Earth. You should just walk away. However, every now and then, you should follow that path. This is how you make a decision about what you should do. You have to ask yourself three questions. Number one, is it big enough? Are you really solving something hard and meaningful. One of the things we say in the group is: do hard things. Are you doing something really challenging, big enough that can really make a difference? Especially if you are privileged enough to be educated, to be healthy, you shouldn't be doing small things. The fact that you're being invested in. You're in a place like the African Leadership University or the Academy. You are in the top 5% of society that got this chance. You might not be wealthy, but you got this chance. So you need to really go after big problems. That's number one. The second question to ask yourself is, are you uniquely qualified to do this thing? So look back in your life and look at all the things that have happened to you, either by accident or by design, and see whether it has prepared you uniquely better than anyone else to do that thing. So, for example, in my case, how many people in the world got the chance to travel across Africa and see the continent at the early age? How many people became a headmaster at the age of 18? How many people had that experience at McKinsey and all these things? So when I was thinking about “should I do the African Leadership Academy?”, I was uniquely prepared. Very few people had had those experiences. Or when I was thinking about doing the university ten years later, again, I was uniquely prepared because of what I'd done with the Academy. So ask yourself, what experiences have you had and how have they uniquely positioned you to do something? And then the third question to ask is, are you truly passionate? And so for this, I use what I call the sleepless night test. If it's something that keeps you up at night and you're so excited about that, you dream about this, you wake up in the morning, you're telling everyone about this, and six months later, you're still passionate about this thing. So when the answer to those three questions is yes, yes, yes. Is it big enough? Are uniquely qualified? Are you truly passionate and does it pass the sleepless night test? Then that's the time you should follow that path.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS: I love it. It's pretty much in line with the framework I shared with you, Fred. If I may just challenge you in a very nice way actually, of course, I always love to have people having great sleep and myself working on sleep for a few years now with my ring, but I know exactly what you mean in terms of the passion at night, because it happens to me still today, despite my work on my own quality of sleep.

FRED SWANIKER:  As I've gotten older, I've come to appreciate good sleep. But maybe when I was 16, 17, I think you can… It's really a state of mind, you know what I'm saying? If it's something you're so passionate about.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS:  I'm with you. So most of us would agree that we want to see a world where everyone can learn and prosper. And a big part of that is for people to be able to find dignified work. You've created the African Leadership Accelerator, which is delivering training courses for people to accelerate their learning in data science, data AI in particular. You've 250,000 people, I think, in training today, maybe even more across the group. And last year you set up Sand Technologies to use the talent that comes from the training. So is Sand Technologies the next logical step towards your goal of creating these 3 million African leaders? And if yes, how do you connect the dots again between technologies, training, leadership and the African continent altogether?

FRED SWANIKER:  If you think about the journey we've been on. We started this small scale initiative, the African Leadership Academy, 250 students at a time, 250 young leaders. We then scaled to the University, which has 2,000 young leaders. And then six years ago, we realized that technology was becoming a very powerful force in the world and that the leaders of Africa would need a new competence. So we created ALX. And what ALX does is we first start by training people in leadership skills. So they spend six months learning about these grand challenges that I talked about – healthcare, education, climate change and so forth. And then we also teach them leadership, ethics and values, because we believe that technology is a very powerful force. Things like AI and so forth. But if it's not fused with ethics and values, then it can be dangerous. And so we want to make sure that people who are going into software engineering have a sense of ethics and values so that they can build software that's going to be good for the world, because they've been exposed to these challenges, so then now they're coding for a purpose. I want to learn how to code to improve healthcare. I want to code so I can improve education, to improve climate change, so that we're creating purpose-driven engineers with a conscience and then with the ethics and values, we hope that when they start to train AI models, they're going to do it with less bias and so forth. 

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS:  If I may, Fred, what does it mean in terms of teaching ethics? Because you are super deliberate about the leadership missions that you talked about and what it is and the way they work, hands on. How do you work on ethics just to make it real for listeners on a podcast?

FRED SWANIKER:  Ethics comes from your inner core, so it's less about teaching them, but helping them to understand their own values and their moral compass and getting them to reflect on what drives them and how they make decisions. And then also having them debate and discuss with others, ethical situations, and getting different points of view and understanding on what it means to have integrity and things like that. So it's about discussions, debate, simulations and role modelling as well, bringing people that you consider as ethical individuals, exposing them to the likes of Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, Desmond Tutu, people that have really sacrificed for the greater goo. Again, ethics often comes from… There’s different points of view about what is right or wrong, but there are some universal values. For example, most societies would agree that it is wrong to kill people aimlessly. You should not steal. You should not punish. So these are some things you should stick to what you say you're going to do. So these are the things that you try and instil through role modelling through what you reward in the community, who you celebrate all this kind of stuff. So these are the ways in which you can do. But we're not claiming that we're creating perfect individuals. We're creating people who are aware of these choices that they have to make. And hopefully will make more deliberate choices. So anyway, so with that whole program, we now have and are building a massive pool of technology talent. Today we're training over 250,000 people and our end goal is to train 3 to 5 million software engineers, data scientists, cloud computing talent in the next decade. One thing that you may not be aware of or that the world may not know, is that Africa is the youngest continent in the world. The average age of an African is 19, compared to 38 in the US, 44 in Germany, 48 in Japan. Asia is aging. The US and Europe have already aged and Africa is young. So this is the continent's future workforce. And so what we're doing is building a massive pool of technology talent and infusing it with ethics and values and my ambition is to employ a million of these graduates in Sand Technologies. So train 3 to 5 million through ALX and employ a million in Sand Technologies to build one of the largest technology services companies in the world, where we can take these digital leaders, as we call them, to go into governments, to help them to navigate the digital transformation, to go into companies, to go into start ups. And then because every company now is a tech company, every government is now a tech company, but they don't know how to implement the technology. They don't have the skills in house and we believe we can support them. So in setting up Sand Technologies, what we're also doing is we're transitioning from being an education institution that just trains talent and leaders and hopes that others put them to use to  actually becoming an implementation company where we're actually saying we are going to get our hands dirty and roll out a new digital health system for a country, or we're going to get our hands dirty and build a solution that's going to help companies to reduce their carbon emissions or we're going to help a city to create a smart city or help bring clean drinking water to people using AI. These are the things that we are beginning to and that we're choosing to do for the next couple of decades is to use technology to solve hard, meaningful problems for society.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS:  That's such an amazing, I would say, mind blowing ambition. Reminds me of what Arthur Andersen started doing back in the 50s. At the time, it was just an accounting firm, but one of its managers saw that persuading partners to invest in technology development was the way to go. And of course, the rest is history. With the birth of Accenture in the early 2000s, and now it has become the world's largest professional services company with revenue north of $64 billion. Fred's plan with Sand Technologies to roll out digital solutions in healthcare and climate change is almost like building the new Accenture of Africa, for the world, for the future. Listening to you, Fred, you are super deliberate about the way you work on leadership skills and values and so on. What about the sense of mission of those developers, young African tech leaders, that you are developing as they graduate and work for Sand? Are you again focusing on that mission framework for them?

FRED SWANIKER:  Absolutely. As they go through ALX, they come in with the expectation that they're going to do software engineering or data science or cloud computing. They spend the first six months not doing anything with technology, just exposing them to these grand challenges and opportunities and leadership training and ethics and values. And they have to choose a mission. So then when they start coding and learning the technology and AI, they have a purpose. And then similarly, when we enter Sand Technologies, many of the projects that we do are really meaningful projects. That thread is there across from the way they're being trained at ALX to when they join us at Sand Technologies.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS:  It makes a lot of sense. So let's continue to discuss more the new AI era and what it means for Africa and for Sand Technologies and more. You touch obviously on this very critical topic of what is called responsible AI. I'm an optimist myself, I believe actually that AI can transform the world for good. But we have to make sure that's the case. And on the podcast, a couple of guests with whom I discussed that. I had Sal Khan, who I'm sure you know, who created this incredible teaching assistant powered by AI called Conmigo, which is very exciting. It's all about personalized learning at the pace of the learner to actually develop their critical thinking skills and learn at their pace as well. I also just recorded an episode with Kevin Scott. Kevin Scott is a friend, partner of mine in the Microsoft senior leadership team. He's the CTO of Microsoft, and he was talking about the fascinating work done by Microsoft Research on applying AI to help build the next electrolyte for energy storage, and designing a therapeutic molecule that will cure very tough diseases, actually, and it goes on and on. So what's your vision with AI? With Sand Technologies, and at the core of your academies as well? Do you see that as a copilot, as we call it at Microsoft, a copilot for the leaders along their side?

FRED SWANIKER:  Absolutely. I mean, every leader today needs to be able to use technology to drive change. It's just a core. It's just part of their competencies that they need to have. It’s AI, yes, but it goes more broadly than that. It must start first with your ethics and values. What is the change you want to see in the world? And then technology can help you do that in a more efficient way, in a more scalable way, in a lower cost way, in a more personalized way, etc.. For example, we are working in certain developing countries in Africa using AI to bring world class healthcare to rural areas. So connecting rural clinics in Africa with SpaceX Starlink satellite so that they have high speed bandwidth and then with that, you see, because in Africa we don't have enough doctors. In Italy, for example, there's 300 patients to a doctor. In Africa the average is 8000 patients to a doctor. And in some countries like South Sudan, 66,000 patients to a doctor. And it takes seven years to train a doctor, hundreds of thousands of dollars. We will never catch up. And the population continues to grow. So we realized we need to reimagine how you deliver healthcare. For example, Google's Gemini passed the medical licensing exam in the US with a score of 96%. With that, now you can equip a nurse in the rural area if you have high speed bandwidth with AI enabled devices that they can then use to do more sophisticated diagnosis of a patient. And then because we have high speed bandwidth, you can now do telemedicine to a doctor sitting somewhere else. They can then examine the patient remotely. We've linked the system to a zipline, which can come and drop medicine by drone. But the real power, all that, then all the data that's been collected comes into a national health intelligence centre for the Minister of Health of the country to be able to see real time what's going on in the system. Yesterday 500 babies were born. What is the disease burden by district? You can start to see there's early signs of a pandemic, so you can treat it before it gets too bad. So really flipping how healthcare is done from treating people when it's too late, when a cancer has spread or diabetes has caused a person to have a heart attack and rather being much more preventative and predictive, when it's much cheaper to do. So with that, we have actually rolled the system out. We've done in one country and we're talking to other countries in Africa. And with this now we're bringing world class healthcare to people in rural Africa, using AI and advanced analytics and allowing governments to make better decisions about where to invest their budget and how to identify people who are at risk of cancer early on and treat them and so forth. So that's just one example. We're also similarly in health, using AI to help the Ministry of Health to plan where they should build health facilities. So using satellite imagery, looking at where is the population, where are the roads, all these multi dimensional variables that a human being cannot compute. You've got a limited budget. Within those constraints, what is the optimal place to put your health facility so that you can increase healthcare access? We're doing the same thing with telecommunications access. The president of a country wanted to know how do I bring connectivity to all my citizens? We were able to use AI to tell them exactly where they should put the cell phone towers, so that more people would have connectivity so they can access education and things like that. The final example I give is, in the UK, we are helping a water company. The treatment of wastewater is one of the greatest emitters of carbon in the world. And so we have built a digital twin of the waste treatment plant. And with that, we're able to use AI to help them figure out how do you make decisions to really reduce the carbon footprint of this waste treatment plant and so forth? There's many programs like that where we are saying, healthcare, education, climate change, telecommunications access, these are all problems that the world is facing, agriculture. How do we feed more people in Africa using AI techniques to improve crop productivity and things like that? So these are the things that we think, if AI is harnessed in the right way, can really transform the world.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS:  I love it. There are so many other use cases I've also witnessed myself in Africa, in Asia, in Europe using AI, and I believe in a power of both enabling governments, leaders, but also people on the ground like the farmers, like the nurses and so on with the AI assistant as your copilot of your lives to be more meaningful. So I'm with you, and I think there will be wonderful opportunities together with others to make that happen. But just moving on a little bit. I was speaking recently to someone you may know, the Nigerian banker philanthropist, Tony Elumelu, on a podcast about the role of the private sector in development. And Tony, as you probably are aware, through his foundation, has pledged $100 million of his own money to provide training, mentorship and funding for at least a thousand young African entrepreneurs every year. It’s all about the vision of development and the way you connect between donors, philanthropists, government, internationalisation as well. My question is, given your experience of what you've built over the years, how do you bring the different stakeholders around the table to help building this new generation of leaders? Because it can be so much more powerful if all parties are invited to the game?

FRED SWANIKER:  We believe very much in collaboration. We identify several parties on the continent that share our values that we can work with. For example, we work very closely with the Mastercard Foundation. We have about 10,000 schools in Africa that feeder institutions that send their talents to our different institutions. We work with different companies that give our students internships. We work with governments who are providing us access to their ministries of education, who we are also collaborating with to take some of the best practices that we're developing in the different education institutions to take them into their public institutions to spread the best practices there. We are collaborating with governments to help them digitize to their services to reduce corruption, increase transparency, increase effectiveness. So the entire African Leadership Group journey has been one big exercise in collaboration. We could not have done this by ourselves. From all the different parties. We've collaborated with other NGOs that are developing talents and we share our knowledge with them. They share their knowledge with us. I really believe in building partnerships, networks and relationships and then through that, you can do a lot more than just going by yourself.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS:  And I suddenly realized as well as you do this kind of work, particularly with foundations, academia and so on or over a long period. It's not just one year, one shot, one announcement we do with governments or this one or that one, you have also, like with the donor story we discussed together, you truly have to align them on your mission as well. How did you manage to do that? Because you've got a very strong vision mission. You communicated that super well over the last 50 minutes of the discussion already. How did you convince some of the government leaders and some of the biggest foundations – I had the pleasure to have a Rita Roy on my podcast as well of those biggest foundations – how do you convince her to get on your side, to do what you do?

FRED SWANIKER:  Well, I think firstly it starts with trust. Mastercard Foundation, for example, they are our single largest funder. The African Leadership Group would not have scaled to where it is without their incredible support. We started working with them in a very small way in 2009 and they saw what we did with their small grant, and then they gave us a slightly bigger one. They saw what we did with that, and they gave us... And then it grew. Some individual donors who maybe gave us $10 million, they started with a first grant of $10,000 and then they saw what you did with it. So ultimately you have to do what you say you're going to do. You have to create trust. And trust comes from having integrity, delivering on what you say you're going to do and ultimately bringing people along and communicating and creating. And so I've realized that there's three phases of credibility. The first phase is your personal credibility, where people know you, they believe in your personal track record. And I would say the early funders joined us because of that. They were people that I knew, they were my former bosses from McKinsey, my friends and colleagues from business school, people who knew me and they were like friends and family who said, okay, I know Fred. When he says he's going to do something, he does it. That's phase one. Phase two is stories. Now phase two is where you now say, let me tell you the story of what I'm doing. Let me show you the young person. You publish a report. You show videos which tell stories of what you're doing. And that's fine and it moves you to get more support. But after a while your story is not enough. You now need data. So the third phase of credibility is data where you can now show with evidence here's the impact that I'm having. So we have created, for example, a dashboard where we are tracking every single young person we have trained. We have 400 data points on them. We know their age, their gender, where they're located, and we can literally show you on a dashboard every day this person from that program just got a job with this company. This person just founded a company and they've hired these people. You can see the entrepreneurs you created, how many jobs they're creating, how much… We have all this data so that we can show to someone the proof of what we're doing. And with that, you're able to get more and more resources and more and more support. So that's what I've learned about how to build credibility as you’re driving change in the world.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS:  I think that that's super strong. And to me, this is all about what we call measuring impact. And impact is hard to measure. You can have a lot of theories about the theory of change and impact, but the way you just spelled it out is all about impact along the journey of the leaders and the way it materialized after the years in their jobs, in their impact and so on and so forth. We are coming almost to an end. The last couple of questions. I need to ask you a couple of questions around positive leadership, because that's what I do in this podcast. And it's not an accident. I invited you, of course, on positive leadership. At the core of the foundational model of positive leadership, you've got those three circles – me, me and others and me in the world. And so it's all about creating the self-confidence, the self-management of your positive energy, the sense of mission you have in yourself to connect with others, to build with others, to coach, to grow them so that you can have a positive impact in the world. So what does positive leadership mean for you, and how do you use your positive energy to change the world?

FRED SWANIKER:  positive leadership for me means, one, being optimistic that there can be a better world. Because if you're not optimistic then there's just no point in being a leader. You've got to believe that there's a better way, there's a better world, there's a better future. So it's about believing that there can be a better way and being optimistic. Secondly, it's about using your skills, your networks and your relationships to drive positive change in the world because you can have leadership skills, but not leverage them in a positive way. If you think about it, Adolf Hitler had really great leadership skills, but he used it for a terrible outcome. So it's about using those leadership skills to drive positive change in the world. I think of a leader as an agent of positive change. Are you moving the world forward in a positive way? Finally, it's about bringing people along because you cannot do this by yourself. Can you inspire others? Can you motivate others to join you in this journey? So it's about creating a movement of people who share your values, who believe in this, and actually then can bring their own energies to amplify your energy, and then with that, you create a massive ripple effect of impact and positivity in the world.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS:  Love it. It's wonderful definition. I love the ending of being a positive energy amplifier to the world, and the way you build that. Almost to the very end. I know that one of your favourite book, Fred, that inspires you because you talk about it in multiple interviews is Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smart by Liz Wiseman. And I think in this book, there's a theory about why some leaders [00:58:02 SKIP IN AUDIO] to achieve that dream. So thank you so much, Fred, for having this wonderful conversation out of Kigali and looking forward to staying in touch, to working with you and to drive that positive leadership all across Africa and the world. Thank you so much. 

FRED SWANIKER:  Thank you so much, JP. It's such a pleasure to speak with you today. Take care. 

People who work with me will probably say that I get them to dream bigger than they ever thought possible. I give them chances to try things. I don't believe in failure. I think everything's a learning opportunity. I always say that everything is a learning opportunity – either a learning opportunity that goes according to plan or that doesn't go according to plan. But everything is a learning opportunity. So I make it safe for people who work with me to try things and fail, quote unquote learn, but I don't penalize you for that. I'd rather you fail at something extraordinary than succeed at something. So I challenge people. I give them a chance to dream big. I give them roles and responsibilities way earlier than they're ready for so that they are stretched. With that, they grow exponentially. I throw people the deep end. I give them big challenges and I trust them. I really trust them. With that, I think I'm able to get people to really multiply, to multiply myself as a leader and for them to multiply others as well.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS:  I think it's wonderful. Almost closing because my last question has to be the following. What's your dream of Africa, Fred, when you will have transformed actually 3 million young Africans into 3 million of multiplier leaders, and you have created the Accenture of the world in Africa? What are you going to do when that dream comes true?

FRED SWANIKER:  Well, I probably would not be alive to see the full impact of this work. One of the articles we give every young leader in the African Leadership Group is the article about those who built the cathedrals. So when you think about it, you go to the Cathedral of Milan. It's this beautiful building. You see this incredible architecture and art, and it's standing strong, but it took 400 years to build that cathedral, sometimes 600 years to build a cathedral. People worked on it, and they came to the end of their life, and they had not seen the full impact of their work. For me, I see my work as a cathedral builder, and I want all the leaders that we're developing to think of themselves as cathedral builders. We're building the Cathedral of Africa, where we are going to do our bit. We'll lay a foundation. We’ll create this generation of leaders, and they will obviously do hopefully great things on the continent. They will bring better healthcare and better education and better governance to people, to hundreds of millions of people in Africa. But even they will come to the end of their life and there will still be work to be done. But a hundred years from now, 200 years from now, the continent will be this incredible, beautiful, prosperous continent with good healthcare, good housing, everything that we consider makes a good life. And I hope that we would have made a small contribution to build the foundation for that to happen.

JEAN-PHILIPPE COURTOIS:  That's such a positive, optimistic way to end our conversation an indeed podcast. That's such a positive, optimistic way to end our conversation and this podcast. Building the Cathedral of Africa, collaborating to bring about change, as Fred has been saying, and carrying that vision through generations to come. And I can tell you that as a Frenchman, as a Parisian, I really relate to the cathedral metaphor and the work to rebuild Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris after the devastating fire in 2019. If you enjoyed this episode, then please do leave us a comment or a five star rating and make sure you subscribe to the podcast so you can hear the latest episodes as soon as they come out. I am Jean-Philippe Courtois. You've been listening to the Positive Leadership Podcast. Thanks so much for listening. Goodbye.